Click to viewWhen formerly-free phone-to-text service Jott announced they would start charging for its smartest functions this week, it caught a lot of fans by surprise. Good, free things can't last forever, but once you get used to adding calendar appointments and to-do items, emailing or texting friends, and even blogging directly from a phone call, it's hard to imagine losing those tools. While $4/month isn't an unfair price, many folks just don't shell out for web-based services—and, in many cases, they might not need to. Here are some of the best ways to capture your thoughts and to-dos while on the go from any cellphone, with or without voice transcription.

reQall has been the lesser-noticed phone-to-text service ever since its soft launch in January 2007. That's a shame, since it offers similar quality in transcription and a wider array of interfaces to access those notes. It doesn't have Jott's full complement of compatible webapps, because it's focused instead on serving as your personal server for notes, to-dos, shopping lists, reminders, and even photographic reminders. Once you've called, recorded, and had your notes transcribed, the system can smartly organize them (saying "Buy x" adds it to your "Shopping" list) and lets you get at them from IM, text message, email, over the web, or in a variety of mobile and desktop apps.

But you don't have to give over your whole productivity routine to reQall. It offers both an RSS and an iCal feed of your time-stamped notes. Most time- and task-management apps can work with, and alert you for, one or the other—Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple's iCal, to name a few. But reQall also offers daily or as-they-happen updates and reminders by SMS, email, or instant message, so even if your on-the-go thoughts don't go directly into Remember the Milk, I Want Sandy, or whatever you collect your ideas in, it's right on your desktop when you get there. Note: If you know a smart way to use reQall's RSS or iCal feeds to integrate it into other apps, by all means, share it in the comments below!

But I hear you saying, "Yeah, but what if I want to mail my friends or co-workers while I'm driving?" The easiest way is getting your compatriots to sign up for reQall, but it's still possible either way, with a little filtering work. There's two steps to doing it:

Use a service like rssfwd.com to forward your reQall feed to your email inbox, or turn reQall's live updates to your email. RSS gives you a cleaner message to send, but seems to update more slowly than email alerts.

Create a filter in your mail client that takes messages from reqall@reqall.com with key words in it—like "To Sarah Smith"—and have it forwarded to, well, Sarah Smith, in this case. You have to set up forwarding for anyone you might message by phone, but that's how it works in Jott as well. It's a decent solution for urgent messages or frequent contacts.

reQall gives Windows Mobile and iPhone users a few free perks by letting them record their notes, online or off, and upload them to the service when they're connected again. That saves phone minutes, and the apps themselves are pretty decent task managers—reQall's offline abilities on the iPhone/iPod touch app are worth a look on their own.

Jott's free account limits messages to 15 seconds, which is just enough time to tell yourself something important—if you've got great memory and don't stumble. Meanwhile, reQall imposes a 30-second restriction. Among the easier solutions to this is file sharing service Drop.io, which lets you fill your account, or "drop," with up to 100MB of whatever—including compressed, recorded audio. Combine that with the ease of sharing those files from Drop.io, and you can explain projects, answer questions, and maybe do something a bit cuter with your voice from anywhere.

Unless you're willing to pay Jott, your ability to navigate traffic while simultaneously logging work expenses and updating your Google Calendar is likely gone for a good time. Then again, driving while talking and mentally sorting your day's data isn't such a hot idea anyways. For nearly any app that Jott can voice-link to, a free Twitter account, or a plain old SMS message, can often get it done with a quick-type message. Set up your Twitter account with your cell phone, and you can start adding GCal events, updating Remember the Milk, getting and setting reminders, and taking advantage of the many other web services that hook up to Twitter. Many of those services also have direct text message interfaces—including Google Calendar and RTM—but Twitter's single-sentence interface makes them a bit faster to punch out, and remember.

As so many of our commenters noted, Jott's hook-up with the free, intelligent scheduler Sandy (alternately "I Want Sandy") was a major selling-point. If voice-calling Sandy on the spot to "Remember we're out of toilet paper" was a killer app, then you are, indeed, out of luck. But Sandy also accepts direct Twitter messages and can be mailed directly from your phone, so if you're not bad at texting, you might just find your virtual assistant still pretty useful.

Use what's still free in Jott

If you've headed over to Jott's list of plans, you'll see that not a lot, beyond short recording, is offered up for the ad-supported free plan. But along with Amazon price-checks, Twitter updates, and a few other "Links," they've kept the "Feeds" function alive, which means you can still get your Gmail subjects read by phone, and listen to feeds from anywhere else on the net. It's a tool that's begging for some crafty Web 2.0-style hook-ups. I'll reiterate here that, for what Jott offers, their paid plans aren't necessarily a ransom—and there's also a pay-as-you-go plan for those who just occasionally enjoy emailing a friend while driving or live-blogging from a concert. But our readers are generally a crafty lot, so let's hear about any other work-arounds and alternatives you can execute. Drop the science in the comments below. Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, won't be truly happy until he can turn off his stove from his cell phone. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, appears Fridays on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Open Sourcery feed to get new installments in your newsreader.